Tag: coffee

But alas, after five years of operating “outside of normal temperature ranges”, this happened:

It seems that convection ovens weren’t meant to have their temperature limiters removed and run for hours on end. The handle, which controls the reed switch to turn the heating unit off and on, melted right off the base.

I knew this would happen someday, and I had planned to build another machine with a leaf blower and a commercial heating element, with robot arms and a positron brain. Alas, the unhappy melting happened right in the middle of rebuilding a fence, writing a bunch of software and getting through several releases at the office. I was posed with the classic question all technology households are posed with: build or buy?

A guy has got to have his home-roasted morning brew. I made a rash decision. I ordered one of these:

After a week of waiting the GeneCafe finally arrived so after fulfilling my daily obligations I came home and took it for a test run on some Rwanda NKanka Kinyaga. In Benjamin Franklin style, here is how five years of DIY roaster technology stacks up to the commercial grade:

GeneCafe

Frankenstein

Pros

Configurable Temperature

Configurable Time

Integrated cooling unit

Excellent chaff removal

Single unit

Easy to clean (so far)

Very even roast

Requires less monitoring

No coasting

Extremely high temperatures

Infinitely configurable

Very low cost

Cons

Long coast time

Small batch size

Long roast/cool times

Temperature

Very high coast

No integrated cooling unit; long cooling times

Requires constant monitoring

Occasionally uneven roasts

Poor chaff removal

The verdict. After the initial two test runs I’ll give the win to the GeneCafe. If only for the sweet analoguish knobs. We’ll see how it holds up after half a decade.